other genres

This page looks at some other blogging genres.

It covers -

• introduction
• academic blogs
• other technical communities
• kids - from Nemo to Emo
• confblogs
• an authorial tool or PR opportunity?

     introduction

Development of a typology of blogging genres is perhaps best left to an enthusiastic postgrad (and googling indicates that several are hard at work on a neo-foucauldian analysis with the requisite genuflection to Lyotard or Chakravarti Spivak).

Thomas Wrede's 2003 Weblogs as a transformational technology for higher education & academic research paper in discussing narrative forms of weblog posts refers to the MeroLog ("Identify the intellectual components of a given topic"), the ResoLog ("Seek resolution between disparate opinions") and MemeSmear ("Track an idea and show how the language around the issue evolves and changes from one idea to another") before suggesting a taxonomy based on content -

• LifeLog - Log things offline (children, books, asphalt, trees, bugs).
• RaceLog - Regularly document links related to racial prejudice, whether black or white or other. Alternatively: RapeLog, PovertyLog
• TheoLog - Atheists vs. Christians.
• PoliLog - Create a characters for each political party/movement. Let them argue.
• CritiLig - Link to critical texts and provide historical critical contexts for the thinking in those texts. Challenge their accuracy and bias.
• ArtSciLog - For every cultural activity, find a corresponding scientific way to interpret it.
• CorpLog - Remark on the activities of corporations. Show the social and political precedents for their actions, and identify consequences.
• ClassicsLog - Read a large group of the classics. Abstract your knowledge into a 20-page text.
• FuryLog - Create a very angry man or woman and have them write extensively about their opinions.
• RhetoLog - Identify the rhetorical constructs beneath the links you post. If you link to a news article, examine the writer's biases and use of language. Point out fallacies. Define a system of thinking.

This page instead offers comments on some genres and their reception. Another perspective is offered by the 2004 Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs (PDF) by Susan Herring, Lois Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus & Elijah Wright.

Overall we would suggest that the outstanding successes are attributable to individual skill rather than genre. In most cases the best blogs have been written by people who would have been just as successful penning an OpEd, doing a piece to camera or writing an article in a journal. Often they have indeed been successful in those formats: blogging is an extension of existing media engagement rather than a new departure.

Successful corporate blogging - whether for communication across an organisation of with that organisation's contacts - is reflective of the organisation's culture. Those in which innovation flows freely are most likely to develop effective institutional blogs but are arguably the least likely to need them.

     academic blogs

Academic blogging has been characterised as metascholarship and metadiscourse, with claims that scholarly blogging by faculty and postgrads -

• "lowers the cost of publishing almost to the vanishing point ... It really does help realize the promise of the Internet as a place for wide-ranging public discussion"
• offers an effective mechanism for peer review
• enables scholars to engage with a wider community and with colleagues overseas

Perhaps as importantly, it also offers instant gratification, with Eric Muller commenting that

What blogging offers is immediacy ... Compared to what we're all used to in academia, where you submit something and then maybe when you have grandchildren you'll hear whether it's going to be published, the immediacy is something that we're all unaccustomed to. I think a lot of people feel sort of like kids in a candy store.

Has blogging contributed to a serious advancement of scholarship, replacing for example the Notes found in some journals? The answer appears to be no. At its best it may, however, be complementing and to some extent superseding the exchange of correspondence in publications such as the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement.

A 2003 Chronicle of Higher Education feature noted that

In their skeptical moments, academic bloggers worry that the medium smells faddish, ephemeral. But they also make a strong case for blogging's virtues, the foremost of which is freedom of tone. Blog entries can range from three-word bursts of sarcasm to carefully honed 5,000-word treatises. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between, where scholars tackle serious questions in a loose-limbed, vernacular mode.

Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.'s.

No wonder, then, that scholarly blogs are sprouting like mushrooms.

Comprehensive statistics are not available but we suspect that many of the mushrooms are withering. Uptake of blogging among the professoriat appears to reflect national academic styles, with greater acceptance in US than in Australia, New Zealand or the EU.

Assessments of the scholarly significance or personal impact of scholarly blogs vary. Arguably many of the most prominent bloggers have gained attention for mastery of the online 'soundbite' (and as provocateurs) rather than as leading scholars offline. Some had previously enjoyed a newspaper or magazine soapbox.

Eric Muller says that he

perceives among academic bloggers 'a talk-radioization' of the discourse, which I'm not especially interested in participating in. It's becoming very personality-driven, very combative, very adversarial. There's a kind of ideological categorizing that goes on ... It really does start to feel like the Rush Limbaugh show.

Blogging among the professoriat appears to reflect national academic styles, with greater acceptance in US than in Australia, New Zealand or the EU and a greater preparedness to venture utside areas of expertise. Most academic blogs have involved law and the social sciences: there's little blogging in the natural sciences or humanities.

Much of the undergrad and postgrad blogging has a confessional flavour, with students reporting on the day's progress, highlighting work presented at seminars or other venues and seeking feedback from local/overseas peers.

     other technical communities

Uptake among other technical communities has been similarly uneven. Although statistics are uncertain our quick survey at the beginning of 2004 suggested that blogs by librarians outnumber those of engineers and architects by over one hundred to one.

Much of the technical blogging has involved publication for a narrow audience rather than a general readership, eg librarians writing for librarians, metadata enthusiasts for others of their ilk, foes of ICANN for the like-minded. That might lead some observers to question claims about blogging as an engine of public discourse. It has also built on traditions in particular technical communities of using electronic bulletin boards and print newsletters for solicitation of information, delivery of advice and community building.

For many readers the attraction of some specialist blogs seems to that the author -

• occupies a position of influence within a professional body or institution, with the blog providing an aperture into an often opaque entity (eg Robert Shaw's ITU Blog)
• is known to other members of the community or has the status of an elder statesperson
• has an engaging style
• draws on information from a wider/richer personal network than that of many readers (eg Peter Suber's FOS blog)
• is able to assess and interpret statements made by other members of the community

John Patrick, whose enthusiasm for enterprise blogging was highlighted on the preceding page of this profile, comments that

It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom—in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers. And such people write a blog about, say, customer relationship management, and they're taking the time to find the experts and the links to leverage, to magnify what they're writing about. And from those links people can be led to information and see things in a context they might not have considered before.

People won't go to the company intranet to search for information. Instead, they'll look in blogs see what people they trust and respect have to say. The company intranet simply doesn't have that kind of credibility, nor ever will at many companies. Further, blogs aren't old, like an HTML document that's been there since 1997. Instead, blogs are very likely to be something that interests [the blogger] greatly. Bloggers are writing all the time about what's current in various contexts and subject categories. Blogs are off-the-cuff, candid, real - and now.

We have highlighted particular examples in the News, Journals & People Guide on this site.

     kids - from Nemo to Emo

Blogging among the under-20s spans the continuum from Nemo (pre-teen burblings about cute little fish) to emo, angst-ridden teens letting it all hang out.

Emily Nussbaum in the New York Times commented in 2004 that for many bloggers

distinctions between healthy candor and ''too much information'' are in flux and that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a generation were given a massive technological truth serum.

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.)

Parental angst, however painful, however inevitable, is perhaps less of a concern than youthful inexperience with concerns such as harassment, defamation and long-term accessibility.

Rhodri Marsden questioned the 'it's my blog and I'll cry if i want to' trend among some older bloggers, commenting that

I find confessional-type entries a little difficult to stomach. You're having all manner of stuff revealed to you - personal foibles, health problems, sexual inadequacies - when you barely know these people. I've seen people announce on their blog that they've dumped their fellow-blogger boyfriend. And then proceed, a week later, to blog about the new love of their life. And then blog a request to their boyfriend not to be "such a dick". And all in public. You can't help feeling that a phone call between the relevant parties would have been a better course of action. It certainly doesn't make for very comfortable reading.

It can also bite you, after the requisite 15 nano-seconds of fame. US senatorial aide Jessica Cutler for example was fired in 2004 over the "unacceptable use of Senate computers" in blogging her personal life, notably what the UK Independent characterised as "her racy love life with up to six different partners", with the claim that

Most of my living expenses are thankfully subsidised by a few generous older gentlemen. I'm sure I am not the only one who makes money on the side this way: how can anybody live on $25,000 a year?"

That is of course more than the earning of most of the world's population, although they don't blog or live in Washington DC.

One attempt to get to grips with female bloggers who apparently aren't dependent on the kindness of strangers is Lois Scheidt's 2004 paper Addressing the Unseen: The Audience Envisioned for Adolescent Diary Weblogs.

Blogging about the under-fives (aka mommy blogs) has emerged since 2002, with the New York Times sniffing in 2005 that

For the generation that begat reality television it seems that there is not a tale from the crib (no matter how mundane or scatological) that is unworthy of narration. ... While it is impossible to know if the reader of Good Housekeeping circa 1955 would have been recording her children's squabbles on www.myperfectchild.com, had the internet arrived half a century earlier, it is hard to imagine her going head to head with Ben MacNeil, who has chronicled his year-and-a-half-old daughter's every nap, bottle feeding and diaper change (3,379, at last check) on the Trixie Update (trixieupdate.com).

Today's parents - older, more established and socialized to voicing their emotions - may be uniquely equipped to document their children's' lives, but what they seem most likely to complain and marvel about is their own. The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption.

Ayelet Waldman worried (why worry in private when you can share via a confessional article in Salon) about

discovering a compulsive need to open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts beneath. But at what cost to my kids?

.... I blogged daily, chronicling everything from what my youngest son ate for dinner (one spaghetti noodle, one pat of butter, and all the green, blue and pink frosting off a very large cupcake), to the Supreme Court's dramatic shift on sentencing guidelines, to the various side effects of the medications I take for my bipolar disorder. As soon as I read something interesting, as soon as I heard something moving, as soon as one of my children said something funny, I posted to my blog.

She notes that

My daughter shouted at her father, "You like being mean to us; you're nothing but a hatred machine." Half an hour later, it was in print online. The children are not allowed to read my blog -- they are still young enough that I can monitor their computer use with relative ease. ... there will surely come a day when they will Google themselves, find my blog and both be furious with me for having stolen their lives and humiliated at the extent to which I have laid open my own.

     confblogs

The latest genre appears to be confblogs, ie blogs that cover conferences.

Typically they feature comments - often in real time - about presentations at conferences, with some of the more zealous confbloggers posting full or partial transcripts of presentations and panel discussions. In some instances audiences at conferences have been reading comments posted by wireless while the particular session is underway.

The genre does pose some questions, including authorisation by conference organisers and speakers (some of whom expressly prohibit capture of slides or recording of speeches).

     an authorial tool or PR opportunity?

In one of our unkinder assessments of blogging we suggested that some bloggers were writing with an eye to repackaging the online text as a print-format book.

Others have used their blogs as a mechanism to solicit input. Dan Gillmor for example posted

This is a draft of Chapter 6 of my upcoming book, "Making the News."

My editors and I are most interested in your immediate feedback on:

What's missing -- that is, a topic or perfect anecdote that absolutely has to be included.

More important, what's wrong. If there's a factual error I want to fix it before the book is published.

And, of course, we want to get rid of any cringe-inducing cliches.

The Public Relations Society of America was on the ball with advice about

how to land your clients in the right blog at the right time in order to reap the benefits of their highly receptive audience.

The most important thing a publicist can do before pitching a blogger is to carefully read his or her blog. Unlike beat reporters at typical news outlets, bloggers are extremely idiosyncratic in choice of subject matter and slant. In order to begin a conversation with one - and it should be viewed as a conversation, rather than a pitch - it is vital that you are well-acquainted with the interests of the blogger. Many of them still consider their sites to be personal forums for their views and perspectives, and are wary of corporate or PR interference.

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